Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: Commerce Clause

In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz says you probably didn’t. And it shows:

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of The Federalist for understanding the principles of American government and the challenges that liberal democracies confront early in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds. Small wonder it took so long for progressives to realize that arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare are indeed serious.

Charles Kolb is president of the Committee for Economic Development and was a domestic policy adviser to Bush the Elder. Over at Huffington Post, he articulates why (he thinks) the Constitution’s Commerce Clause empowers Congress to force people to purchase health insurance, but not broccoli. That is to say, he offers (what he thinks is) a limiting principle that (he thinks) would enable the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare’s individual mandate, but still leave some constraints on Congress’s ability to force people to buy things. Like broccoli.

Like every other so-called limiting principle offered by ObamaCare’s defenders, Feldman’s[/Kolb’s] has no basis in the Constitution or any other law. It is a post hoc rationalization, made by people who are shocked to find themselves before the Supreme Court, defending the constitutionality of their desire to bully others into submission.

Now that I’ve woken from the first full night’s sleep since the Supreme Court’s three-day Obamacare marathon began, I can share my thoughts on how the argument went, in case you haven’t seen my first and second days’ reports for the Daily Caller:

The Anti-Injunction Act: On an argument day that can best be described as the calm before the storm, it quickly became clear that the Supreme Court would reach the constitutional issues everyone cares about. That is, regardless of how the justices resolve the hyper-technical issue of whether the Anti-Injunction Act is “jurisdictional,” this law – which prevents people from challenging taxes before they’re assessed or collected – does not apply to the Obamacare litigation. There were also hints that the Court was skeptical of the government’s backup merits argument that the individual mandate was justified under the Constitution’s taxing power. Perhaps the only surprising aspect of the hearing was how “cold” the bench was; it’s rare for the justices to allow advocates to speak at length without interruption, but that’s what they generally did today. That’s yet another indication that the Court will get past the AIA appetizer to the constitutional entree.

The individual mandate: From Justice Kennedy’s noting that the government is fundamentally transforming the relationship of the individual to the government, to Chief Justice Roberts’s concern that “all bets are off” if Congress can enact economic mandates, to Justice Alito’s invocation of a hypothetical burial-insurance mandate, to Justice Scalia’s focusing on the “proper” prong of the Necessary and Proper Clause – and grimacing throughout the solicitor general’s argument – it was a good day for those challenging the individual mandate. Paul Clement and Mike Carvin, who argued for the plaintiffs, did a masterful job on that score, showing again and again the unprecedented and limitless nature of the government’s assertion of federal power. The solicitor general meanwhile, had a shaky opening and never could quite articulate the limiting principle to the government’s theory that at least four justices (and presumably the silent Justice Thomas) were seeking. While trying to predict Supreme Court decisions is a fool’s game, the wise should take note that if Tuesday’s argument is any indication, Obamacare is in constitutional trouble.

Severability: The most likely ruling on severability is that all of Obamacare will fall along with its fatally flawed individual mandate. While such a result would be legally correct, it would still be stunning. Perhaps even more remarkable is that the severability argument proceeded under the general assumption that the mandate would indeed be struck down. This was not a mere hypothetical situation about which the justices speculated, but rather a very real, even probable, event. There’s still a possibility that a “third way” will develop between the government’s position (mandate plus “guaranteed issue” and “community rating”) and that of the challengers (the whole law) – perhaps Titles I and II, as Justices Breyer and Alito mused (and as Cato’s brief detailed) – but the only untenable position would be to sever the mandate completely from a national regulatory scheme that obviously wouldn’t work without it.

Medicaid expansion/coercion: The justices don’t want to reach the factually complicated and legally thorny Medicaid issue. That may be another marginal factor pushing one or more of them to strike down all of Obamacare under a straightforward severability analysis and leave the “spending clause coercion” issue for another day. This was perhaps the most difficult of the four issues to predict, and having heard argument doesn’t really make that task easier. A majority of the Court was troubled by the government’s “your money or your life” stance, but it’s not clear what standard can be applied to distinguish coercion from mere inducements. Then again, if this isn’t federal coercion of the states, I’m not sure what is.

General post-argument reaction: All of my pre-argument intuitions were confirmed, and then some: The Court will easily get past the AIA, probably strike down the individual mandate, more likely than not taking with it all or most of the rest of the law (including the Medicaid expansion). Still, it was breathtaking to be in the courtroom to see the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito all on the same page. (For example, when Justice Kennedy’s first question during yesterday’s hearing was, “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” – a question hostile to the government – my heart began racing.) Much as I’d love to think that my briefs helped get them there even a little bit, ultimately it’s the strength of the constitutional claims and the weakness of the government’s positions that prevailed – or will prevail if the opinions that come down in three months follow along the lines set by this week’s arguments. They may not of course – trying to predict the Supreme Court isn’t a science—but I’m coming out of this week feeling very good.

Finally, for links to all of Cato’s briefs and my last series of op-eds on the Obamacare litigation, see Monday’s blog post.

Cato Senior Fellow Randy E. Barnett argued on behalf of Angel Raich at the Supreme Court in 2004. It was the last big case at the High Court dealing with broad federal assertions of power under the Commerce Clause. On Friday at the Cato Institute’s new F.A. Hayek Auditorium, Barnett laid out the four words that define ObamaCare’s individual mandate: unprecedented, uncabined, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.

Over the last few decades, the number of federal crimes has exploded. The U.S. criminal code has grown so large and so expansive that no one is exactly sure how many federal crimes are actually on the books, with estimates ranging from 4,000 to 300,000. As Justice Scalia has noted, “It should be no surprise that as the volume increases, so do the number of imprecise laws.”

Many individuals and organizations from across the ideological spectrum have voiced concern over this growing trend, recognizing that broadly defined crimes lack the clarity traditionally required before depriving citizens of their liberty.

The expansion of 18 U.S.C § 1001, which criminalizes the knowing and willful making of materially false statements in “any matter within the jurisdiction of” the United States, exemplifies this broadening scope. Cory King was prosecuted under this statute for making a false statement to a state official wholly unconnected to any federal agency or investigation. Yet, the Ninth Circuit held that Mr. King violated § 1001 because the subject matter of his statement was one over which a federal government agency possessed regulatory authority.

King has now asked the Supreme Court to hear his case. Cato has joined the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Texas Public Policy Foundation on a brief supporting him and arguing that the Ninth Circuit stretched § 1001 beyond its proper jurisdictional reach. Such an unbounded interpretation risks greater over criminalization and further misuse of the federal criminal code.

Moreover, since § 1001 is a “process crime” that focuses on offenses “not against the particular person or property, but against the machinery of justice itself,” an excessively broad construction would undermine the integrity of the criminal justice system. Wider application of such crimes facilitates pretextual prosecutions, in which “the operating philosophy seems to be that, if the government cannot prosecute what it wished to penalize, it will penalize what it can prosecute.”

Such an arbitrary and far-reaching application of the criminal code – the federal criminal code, at that – has no place in a free society.

The Court will decide whether to take up King v. United States sometime this spring.

With the scheduled three days of oral argument six weeks away, Cato filed its fourth and final Supreme Court amicus brief in the Obamacare saga, this time on the most critical issue: the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Alongside Pacific Legal Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, 14 other organizations, and a bipartisan group of 333 state legislators, we urge the Court to affirm the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling that the mandate exceeds Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

Under modern doctrine, regulating intrastate economic activity can be a “necessary” means of carrying out Congress’s regulatory authority (as that term is understood under the Necessary and Proper Clause) if, in the aggregate, it has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. But the obvious corollary is that regulating non-economic activity cannot be “necessary,” regardless of its economic effects. And a power to regulate inactivity – to compel activity – is even more remote from Congress’s commerce power.

The government characterizes not being insured as the activity of making an “economic decision” of how to finance health care services, but the notion that probable future participation in the marketplace constitutes economic activity now pushes far beyond existing precedent. Further, that definition of “activity” leaves people with no way of avoiding federal regulation; at any moment, we are all not engaged in an infinite set of activities. Retaining the categorical distinction between economic and non-economic activity limits Congress to regulating intrastate activities closely connected to interstate commerce – thus preserving the proper role of states and preventing Congress from using the Commerce Clause as a federal police power. The categorical distinction also provides a judicially administrable standard that obviates fact-based inquiries into the purported economic effects and the relative necessity of any one regulation, an exercise for which courts are ill-suited.

Finally, the mandate violates the “proper” prong of the Necessary and Proper Clause in that it unconstitutionally commandeers the people – and in doing so, circumvents the Constitution’s preference for political accountability. The Constitution permits Congress to intrude on state and popular sovereignty only in certain limited circumstances: when doing so is textually based or when it relates to the duties of citizenship. For example, Congress may require people to respond to the census or serve on juries. In forcing people to engage in transactions with private companies, the individual mandate allows Congress and the president to evade being held accountable for what would otherwise be a tax increase. In improperly commandeering citizens to engage in economic activity, the mandate obscures Obamacare’s true costs and thus avoids the political accountability and transparent budgeting that the Constitution demands.

The mandate is thus neither a necessary nor proper means for carrying into execution Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Upholding it would fundamentally alter the relationship of the federal government to the states and the people; nobody would ever again be able to claim plausibly that the Constitution limits federal power.

Back in June, I wrote about a law review article I had just completed that detailed my first year or so of activities surrounding the Obamacare lawsuits. Well, now it’s officially published, in the Florida International University Law Review. Here’s the abstract:

This article chronicles the (first) year I spent opposing the constitutionality of Obamacare: Between debates, briefs, op-eds, blogging, testimony, and media, I have spent well over half of my time since the legislation’s enactment on attacking Congress’s breathtaking assertion of federal power in this context. Braving transportation snafus, snowstorms, and Eliot Spitzer, it’s been an interesting ride. And so, weaving legal arguments into first-person narrative, I hope to add a unique perspective to an important debate that goes to the heart of this nation’s founding principles. The individual mandate is Obamacare’s highest-profile and perhaps most egregious constitutional violation because the Supreme Court has never allowed – Congress has never claimed – the power to require people to engage in economic activity. If it is allowed to stand, then no principled limits on federal power remain. But it doesn’t have to be this way; as the various cases wend their way to an eventual date at the Supreme Court, I will be with them, keeping the government honest in court and the debate alive in the public eye.

Go here to download “A Long Strange Trip: My First Year Challenging the Constitutionality of Obamacare.”